The purpose of this activity is to have students address the question “What have I got from my Erasmus experience that is not strictly related to my academic career?”. Specifically, this breaks down into two broad foci. The first two tasks concern the theme of citizenship, and ask students to reflect on how they may view themselves as global citizens as a result of their study abroad, and on what European citizenship may mean to them. The second theme revolves around how mobility is perceived in the professional world, what skills the students have acquired from the Erasmus experience, and how they can communicate those gains to future employers.

This activity invites students to look back critically on how they talk about their Erasmus experience with other people once they have returned home. As other narrators, students will tend to construct different narratives for different audiences. This does not imply, however, that one ‘version’ of an episode is more or less ‘true’ than another.

This activity responds to the needs of students returning from study abroad to reflect on their experiences and share these with others, as well as to help future mobile students. Here, Erasmus students are asked to consider how they translate their experience (intercultural or otherwise) into self-representation, and how they can help future Erasmus exchange students to reflect on their pre-departure expectations.

This activity offers Erasmus students the opportunity to obtain intercultural experience in a volunteering organisation in the host society. The students engage in intercultural dialogue with the local population and develop communication capabilities in potentially multiple languages and contexts. Also, volunteering increases social and job skills, which may considerably enhance students’ employability. Thus students gain experience of intercultural communication in the workplace. This activity engages Erasmus students in critical intercultural reflection through journal writing and practical fieldwork in an organisation.

This activity is designed to help students reflect on how their host environment - the place or region, its neighbourhoods, the university, etc. - has been shaped by its history and culture(s), by the activities and interactions of the communities who live there and by the way they occupy and use the spaces available to them. The tasks within the activity are intended to encourage students to compare their own experience and perception of the host environment with those of others, namely those of both other students and more permanent residents.

This activity is designed to encourage students to reflect on their actual Erasmus experiences along four complementary themes: (1) the emotional dimension of living abroad; (2) their social contacts within the Erasmus community as well as with local students/people; (3) the academic life in the host institution; and (4) their language experiences.

The activity is related to the goal of reflecting on what it means to engage with others during a stay abroad. It helps students refrain from creating categories of ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ others, reflecting on the idea that all people are potentially interesting and worth meeting. The activity also aims at encouraging students to engage with other mobile students, for instance by having former mobile students share experiences with new mobile students.

The aim of this activity is to explore in depth narratives in the context of intercultural mobility, and more specifically, of study-abroad experiences. In this activity, students explore examples of narratives and confront the challenges and questions surrounding them within their own (future, present or past) Erasmus mobility perspective.

This activity encourages students to reflect on discrimination and how it can touch upon everyone through implicit or explicit processes. In this activity students first discuss their own experiences of discriminatory practices in their own environment and elsewhere. Then, through the series of tasks, they are gradually guided to analyse discourses of discrimination in the media (TV news and the Internet) by deconstructing images of otherness, which are often conveyed by specific language choices. The ultimate objective is to enable students to apply what has been presented and discussed within the study circle of the class to their own explorations of discriminatory events/texts/images in their own lives and communities, and in the context of their future study abroad.

This activity invites the students to explore the concept of ‘multiple identities’ and to consider how it is related to intercultural communication. This concept is considered fundamental in view of an experience abroad. In addition, terms such as ‘co-constructed’, ‘negotiated’, ‘ascribed’, ‘contested’ identities will be introduced at the beginning of the activity and then practised in the four tasks, in order to provide the students with the appropriate language to articulate the concepts introduced. It will be in the light of these concepts that other more common terms are reconsidered, namely those of ‘stereotype’, ‘prejudice’, ‘essentialism’, and ‘ethnocentrism’.

These are the slides accompanying Module 3 of the IEREST (Intercultural Education Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers) resources. They provide some theoretical support for the 3 upon-return activities.

These are the slides accompanying Module 2 of the IEREST (Intercultural Education Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers) resources. They provide some theoretical support for the 3 while-abroad activities.

These are the slides accompanying Module 1 of the IEREST (Intercultural Education Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers) resources. They provide some theoretical support for the 4 pre-departure activities.